In the Palm of His Hand novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dalton Street
Penelope Hanrahan finds a shot man bleeding in an alley, packs the wound with her hands and stitches him in her kitchen. He says he is going to marry her.
I was cutting through the alley behind the dry cleaner on Dalton Street when I heard a man try to breathe and fail.
It was past eleven, and I was coming off my Saturday shift on the campus ambulance.
I still had my bag over my shoulder, with the trauma pads and the gloves in it.
He was sitting against the brick, one knee up, with his black coat open.
His left hand was pressed to his side, and the hand was black and wet.
"Don't," he said, when I got close.
His voice was low, and very calm for a man leaking that much.
"Don't call anyone."
I knelt down anyway and pulled on my gloves.
"I'm an EMT," I said. "Move your hand."
"I said don't."
"And I said move it."
He looked at me then.
He had green eyes, a dark-blond beard and a face that was too sharp to be handsome until you stopped being scared of it.
He took his hand away.
Blood came up through his sweater in a slow pulse.
I shoved a pad against it with both palms and leaned my weight into him.
He hissed through his teeth.
I felt his stomach go hard under my hands.
"Good," I said. "That means you can feel it."
"You're very small," he said.
"You're very bleeding."
Something that was nearly a laugh went through his chest.
His right hand came up and closed around my wrist.
It was a huge hand, rough across the palm, and it went all the way around with room to spare.
He didn't squeeze.
He only held on.
The heat of it ran up my arm and landed under my ribs.
I had no business noticing that while my hands were full of his blood.
"Who shot you?" I asked.
"A man with a ring."
"Is he coming back?"
"Not tonight."
I got a second pad on top of the first and a pressure wrap around his ribs.
I pulled it tight enough that he shut his eyes.
"This needs a hospital," I said.
"If I go to a hospital, a policeman writes my name down by morning."
"Good. That's their job."
"And then the man with the ring reads it."
He said it plainly, as a fact.
His thumb moved once across the inside of my wrist, over my pulse, and I didn't pull away.
I should have.
I was twenty-four and in my first year of a master's degree.
I had never in my life carried a stranger home.
I looked at the wound again under the streetlight at the mouth of the alley.
It had gone in and out through the meat above his hip.
It missed everything that mattered.
"I can close that," I said. "It won't be pretty, and you'll hate me."
"What's your name?"
"Penelope."
"Penelope," he said, as if he were putting it somewhere safe.
"My roommate has a car, but I'm not calling her."
"We're taking a cab to the corner of my street, and you're walking the rest of the way."
"I can walk."
"You can lean on me."
He got up in three stages, and I felt every one of them through my shoulder.
He was a foot taller than I was and built.
He put his right arm across my back and a lot of his weight on me.
Neither of us said a word for two blocks.
My apartment was the top floor of a narrow brick rowhouse, with a staircase that had never been wider than a coffin.
He took it without a sound.
Dani had a clinical shift and wouldn't be home until morning.
I put him on the kitchen table under the bright overhead light and cut his sweater off with trauma shears.
His chest was broad and hard and marked with old pale scars.
There was a burn scar over his left forearm, and a gold watch that had probably cost more than my tuition.
I washed the wound out with saline and he watched the ceiling.
"You're good at this," he said.
"I've done it on a mannequin and on one drunk freshman."
"Comforting."
"I have a suture kit from a workshop. Hold still."
I put in six stitches, small and careful, and glued the edges, and he did not make a noise through any of it.
When I tied off the last one my hands finally started to shake.
He saw it.
He put his right hand over both of mine, and it covered them completely.
"You're done," he said. "You did it. Look at me."
I looked.
His eyes were steady and very green, and there was nothing in them that I had been taught to be afraid of.
"Thank you," he said.
"You can sleep on the couch."
"Penelope."
"What?"
"What's your last name?"
"Why?"
"I want to know the name I am going to keep saying."
I started to ask what that meant, and then I noticed that his hand was still over mine and that he hadn't moved it.
"I'm Cal Ransome," he said.
I knew the name.
Everyone in the city did.
It was on the side of the tower going up on Market Street.
The man in the papers owned half of Rittenhouse Square, and he had once been something worse.
That was before his picture started appearing next to ribbon-cuttings.
I pulled my hands out from under his.
"You're the ex-mafia one," I said.
"Ex," he said. "Fourteen months."
"I stitched a mobster in my kitchen."
"You stitched a man who would like very much to take you to dinner."
I laughed, because that was so ridiculous.
He did not laugh with me.
He watched my face with that terrible calm, and he said it.
"I'm going to marry you, Penelope."
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